A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  Still, it would be nice to be prepared for it, just in case. My mistake about not getting laid had ended up much better than I could have imagined, but I didn’t want to get sloppy again. I snuck a glance to my left and right. No one was paying any attention to me. I scooted closer to the stack and nudged the card over. Then my stomach dropped.

  A man’s body lay prone on the ground with ten swords slicing through him. Cool, so this dude had been violently killed. This card portended great things. I picked it up and stared at it, all the same stupid feelings I’d had with that storefront psychic rushing back again. The card trembled in my hand, even though I knew that it meant nothing at all. But how would Margot and Vy react to it? And how the hell was I supposed to react in front of them? Nevertheless was a club for women with bright futures, not women who ended up stabbed to death on the ground.

  Margot’s voice floated across the room, and I looked up to see her and Vy rounding the corner back toward me, still focused on each other. Before I even realized what I was doing, I stuck the offending card in my pocket, then rearranged myself on the couch as if I hadn’t moved the whole time.

  “Whew, sorry about that,” Margot said as they sat back down.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh, just the stress of planning the annual gala for her organization. She’s fixated on getting this one woman to announce her run for representative as the centerpiece of the event. But Tiana keeps going back and forth and is nervous because of . . .” Vy put a hand on Margot’s shoulder, and Margot cut herself off.

  I leaned forward and said, in a quiet voice, “Because of what happened with Nicole Woo-Martin?”

  A coldness slid across both of their faces. I’d misjudged. They weren’t going to talk about her with a trial member. “I’m not sure what you mean,” Margot said.

  “Oh, just how what happened to her showed how hard it is to be a woman in politics.”

  “Mm, it really did,” Margot said. “All right, where were we?”

  “Future card,” Vy said.

  “Ah yes.” Margot shook her wrists out again, then leaned forward, took a deep breath, and turned over the new card on top of the pile. She paused for a moment, bent over it, her shaggy hair falling around her. Then she sat up, revealing a card with three women joined in a circle, their faces beatific, their hands entwined.

  “The Three of Cups,” she said, and I was struck by the strangeness of this situation, by how these two intelligent and ambitious women beside me were staring at this card like believers at a church service, like it was the body of Christ and they were ready to taste of it. Maybe they did believe, at least a little bit, in this new kind of religion where, instead of worshipping some male deity, they worshipped themselves. Instead of reading and rereading a Bible to parse the mysteries of Jesus’s words, they read their horoscopes and tarot cards to parse the mysteries within their own hearts and minds. Because what was more important than that?

  I shivered. “Is the Three of Cups a good one?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, very. It means sisterhood. Celebration.” Margot smiled at me, a genuine smile that showed off her gleaming, even teeth. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “I think it does,” I said, smiling tentatively back. “I know what I hope it means.”

  “Well, then,” she said. “It looks like you’re on the right path after all.”

  * * *

  • • •

  That night when I got home, I pulled the Ten of Swords out of my pocket. There had been no way for me to sneak it back into the deck. The dead man’s hand was outstretched, curled in rigor mortis. I looked up the meaning online, clicking on the first woo-woo website in my search results, scrolling through a long description of why tarot was so meaningful, how it could help you manifest your destiny. (The women of Nevertheless were absolutely the type who would’ve believed in Manifest Destiny back in the eighteen hundreds, secure in the knowledge that they deserved whatever they could take.) God, the amount of copy on this website was practically Dickensian, but finally I found what I was looking for.

  The Ten of Swords: Betrayal. Crisis, the description read. Painful ending.

  I closed out of the window quickly. Good thing I didn’t believe in that shit. Still, I preferred not to look at that card lying around all the time, so I buried it at the bottom of a desk drawer, far out of my sight.

  ELEVEN

  As I waited to hear if I would receive another invitation, I looked for meaning in my everyday routines. I swam so long each morning at the YMCA that my skin pruned, and my ears clogged so badly that I had to buy special drops to dry them out.

  I finalized the sale of my mother’s house. Twenty-five years ago, when my mom and dad bought the place—a small brick row house on a street of small row houses—the neighborhood was so far out from Manhattan that a working-class family could afford to own a home there (with the help of a mortgage, and then maybe a second mortgage). The house, though unassuming, was supposed to be an investment for the future. Thanks to my dad taking off along with his salary and to my mother’s piles of medical bills, it hadn’t worked out that way, even though property values had gone way up. The couple who’d bought the house were yuppies—my age, more than comfortable. They’d picked up on my current status and had told me (kindly but condescendingly) that I didn’t need to move out right away. After all, they needed to take measurements and figure out all the necessary renovations to make the house “their perfect nest” and “inhabitable.” They came over at night sometimes after work and walked through the rooms, frowning at the cracks in the ceiling, pointing to the blue, flowered wallpaper my mother had loved and saying, “Well obviously this has to go.”

  I picked up more and more bartending shifts. The place was a dive that catered mostly to old Irishmen. Hardly any women patronized it—occasionally a passerby would duck her head in, see the clientele, and turn right around. But the regular patrons were harmless and at times even endearing, and they usually got just drunk enough to leave me generous tips and not so drunk that they forgot to pay up entirely. All in all, it was a kind of benevolent morass of testosterone through which I could weave and serve and make a living.

  Raf took me up on my offer for free drinks, and he came by the bar on nights after work when he needed to unwind. The people that he worked with at the restaurant were into hard partying—staying up until four a.m. doing coke, dragging themselves in the next morning to open for brunch. But Raf had tried the hard partying. He’d told me harrowing stories of cooking hungover, sending out bland, watered-down dishes because the regular spices he used threatened to turn his stomach. Now he preferred to have his wits about him. So while the others went elsewhere, he’d come nurse one or two whiskey sodas on a barstool across from my station and let the old regulars regale him with tales of their youth, and we’d talk whenever orders were slow. “Get any more mysterious kitchen visits?” I’d ask him each night, and he would tell me stories about how yes, actually, random women kept showing up. It wasn’t because of me, though, but because one of the restaurant’s busboys was a magnet for romantic drama.

  “Another one came today,” he said one night as I poured a stream of soda into his glass. With any other master restauranteur, I’d be on edge about serving them, worried they’d order some fancy drink and then scoff at my poor excuse for bartending skills, but Raf never ordered anything with more than two ingredients, and he didn’t care if I got the proportions wrong. “She started crying right next to the oven. I tried to give her love advice but that made things worse. So I gave her free plantains and that made things better. It’s rough out there for a single person.”

  “Thank God we’re off the market,” I teased, and he laughed. I leaned over the bar toward him and said, in a lower voice, “Don’t worry, I think we’re close to being able to quit the charade.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’
s not like I have time to date now, anyway.”

  “You are very kind,” I said, then poured myself a whiskey soda to drink along with him. “It’s interesting, part of me wants this assignment to go on forever, because it’s so much more exciting than anything else I’ve done recently. But also, it’s fucking stressful. I get through the day all right, but I’m grinding my teeth at night so hard that my jaw hurts in the morning.”

  “Hey, me too!” he said. “That happened to me with the restaurant opening.”

  “Really? Here’s to repressing your anxiety so that it has no choice but to screw you up when you’re asleep!” I said, and we clinked our glasses across the bar. “Please tell me it eventually went away on its own?”

  “No,” he said. “I had to start wearing a mouthguard to bed.”

  I burst into laughter. “Like in middle school?”

  “Yup,” he said. “Maybe that’s another reason it’s better if I don’t date right now.”

  I kept laughing and he smiled, pleased, until I collected myself. The party of men sitting to Raf’s right took the last swigs of their beers and threw down twenty-dollar bills, slinging their arms around one another as they stumbled to the door. I waved good-bye and began clearing off their section. It was just after midnight, and only a few customers remained, talking rowdily all the way down at the other end of the bar. No way to tell if they’d stay for another two minutes or another two hours.

  Raf cleared his throat. “No, actually,” he said. “It’s been okay to take a break from . . . you know.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “The masses of women throwing themselves at you?”

  He blushed. “It’s not masses, but yeah. I think it was starting to screw with my head.”

  “Why?”

  “Just . . .” He spoke haltingly, stirring the straw around in his drink. “It’s weird knowing that a lot of these women wouldn’t have paid attention to me a year ago. But now that I have some kind of power, or whatever it is, there’s always someone who’s interested. Because are they interested in me, or would they be interested in anyone who had gotten profiled like that in Vanity Fair?” He tugged on his baseball cap, then took it off and began fiddling with it, bending and unbending its brim. “But also, I got that profile because I’ve been working hard, it’s not like it just landed in my lap, so maybe I do deserve it all.” He stopped and looked up from his cap, into my eyes, suddenly worried. “Not that I’m saying I deserve sex, and you know, I’m not upset about getting to hook up with pretty women. I don’t know how to explain it—”

  “No, I think I know what you mean,” I said, and leaned over, resting my elbows on the bar, cupping my chin in my hands. “Like, I think you are one hundred percent worthy of all the interest and always have been, and if a lot of these women had gotten to know you before your success, they still would’ve been lining up outside your door—”

  He laughed. “You’re blowing smoke up my ass.”

  “Only a little,” I said. Sure, Raf had never been rolling in the ladies, but he’d done okay. He had always been catnip for a certain type of girl—overbearing ones who loved the idea of a shy, sensitive soul who would worship them. Over the years, a few of those girls had fallen hard for Raf, had felt that they had “discovered” him. They decided that he would be their boyfriend and pursued him relentlessly, only to be disappointed when they realized he wouldn’t drop everything to be at their beck and call, because sometimes he needed to disappear for a couple of days to work on a recipe, or because he was really close to his parents and listened to them (maybe a little too much) if they hated a new girlfriend of his.

  My mom and I had spent many hours discussing this. “The Problem of Raf,” we called it: that the type of girl who loved the first impression he gave off was also the type not to appreciate the fullness of who he was. When the Vanity Fair profile had come out, I’d brought home a hard copy of the magazine to show to her. She’d been weak and lethargic—we’d ended up taking her to hospice care ten days later, and she’d died only a few days after that—but the article recharged her temporarily. “Maybe this will solve the Problem of Raf,” she’d said to me as she cut out the pages to put them up on our refrigerator, making slow and deliberate strokes with the scissors, needing to use both hands to force the scissors closed. “So if you want your chance with him, you should get in there soon.” (I laughed it off. This was the same woman who had said to me, years before, Oh no, you and Raf should never date. You’d break his heart, and then his family would hate me and I would have to move. But in her final months, she became very concerned that all my eggs were dying, and started trying to set me up with everyone from her doctor to the barista at her coffee shop, who had literally just graduated from high school.)

  “Anyways,” I said to Raf, “now that you’ve got all this interest, I could imagine that it’s hard to separate the women who are genuinely into you from the ones who want you as a sort of . . . trophy.”

  “Yeah, exactly,” he said. “It’s like they’re using me and I’m using them, and that’s okay for a while but then it gets kind of empty, you know?” I nodded, and he shrugged, his cheeks a little red. “Anyway, it’s good to have an excuse to figure it all out.”

  “Well, then,” I said, and patted his hand with my own, my face a perfect mask of sincerity. “You’re welcome.”

  I slid him another drink, and he took a slightly-too-enthusiastic sip of it. “Ah!” he said, startling as some liquid sloshed onto his chin. He wiped at it with the back of his hand, a sheepish grin on his face.

  The party down at the other end of the bar closed out, then pushed back their chairs with loud scrapes and headed out to their next destination, leaving a disaster zone in their wake: crumpled napkins, overturned beer bottles. We always put out little bowls of pretzels on the bar, and these men had decimated them, spewing crumbs all over the place as they talked, knocking one of the bowls off the bar entirely without noticing on their way out.

  I sighed and went to go clean up. “Here, I’ll help you,” Raf said, and grabbed a bar rag. I studied him as he wiped crumbs into his hand with the practiced motion of a man who’d seen all sides of the service industry.

  We hadn’t hung out with this frequency since we were little. The hours of someone working his way up in a kitchen were basically the opposite of what mine had been at Quill. Neither one of us had ever wanted the kind of jobs where we’d just go punch a clock. We’d wanted to pursue passions, and the worlds of those passions had swallowed us up. Since he’d finished culinary school, we’d gone to each other’s places only a few times a year, and that had lessened even more when I’d moved back into my mom’s house. Sure, we saw each other there sometimes, but when he came home, we’d fallen into our old roles, him digging his dusty skateboard out of the basement and riding it down the block while I read a book on my front stoop, occasionally looking up to give him affectionate eye rolls.

  Over the past few years, he’d grown into himself while I’d been distracted.

  Now that my closest female friends had married, moved to the suburbs, and started producing little versions of themselves who demanded all their attention, and now that my mother’s absence highlighted how tenuous all of my other family relationships had always been, I became hyperaware of how lucky I was that I still had someone I trusted. Thank God for this Nevertheless adventure, for reminding me of how important our friendship was. He was maybe the only person left in the world who would be willing to do this crazy thing for me. I didn’t want to try his patience. I didn’t want to screw anything up.

  “What?” he asked, catching me staring.

  “Just . . . thank you, again, for being here for me.”

  “Of course, Jilly,” he said.

  TWELVE

  So yeah, I leaned into my routines when I could. But every other free moment I had, I was reading all that I could find about the women of Nevertheless, starting
with Margot.

  For someone who’d made a name for herself on the parties and events she attended, she was surprisingly tight-lipped about her personal life. She gave plenty of interviews about her business, though. I scrolled through article after article, reading up on her philosophy behind In the Stars so I could know how to talk to her about astrology, then pulled up the app to download it for myself, for research purposes. In the Stars, the icon said, against a blush-pink background speckled with golden stars. The app asked me to input my birthday, and then it needed to know exactly when and where I was born. Text unfurled on the screen. This information will help us determine your moon and rising signs. (More likely this information will get sold to third parties and make us richer.) I did not know what “moon and rising signs” meant, but I dutifully selected Bay Ridge, then paused at the question asking me to type in the precise moment I had emerged into the world. Please be as accurate as possible, so that we can see exactly where the stars were positioned over your birth.

  I didn’t know. I’d have to call my mom to ask. I got as far as starting to put in her cell phone number before I remembered that I couldn’t call my mom because she was gone. She wouldn’t pick up the phone because she didn’t have fucking hands, because she was only ashes that we’d scattered into the Atlantic Ocean, bits and pieces of her floating halfway across the world by now. She couldn’t remember what time I’d been born because her memories didn’t exist anymore, except in the little snippets she’d passed on to me when I’d been smart enough to listen. She’d died, and a whole vast bank of experiences had died with her.

  Anyway, if I had been able to call her, and had said, Hey, Mom, what time did I burst out of your vagina? I need to determine my rising sign, she probably would have said, Honey, what in the world is a rising sign? And when I explained it, she would have teased me about my newfound interest in astrology—she was a practical woman to the end—and so I would have told her about this whole undercover assignment and the mess I was making.